


you set me off like a loaded gun

by Luthor



Category: Mass Effect
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-04
Updated: 2016-04-04
Packaged: 2018-05-31 04:15:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,175
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6455359
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Luthor/pseuds/Luthor
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Jack barely looks up when she hears footsteps. </p>
<p>They’ve become so familiar within the last few weeks that she could probably place them anywhere..."</p>
            </blockquote>





	you set me off like a loaded gun

**Author's Note:**

> This is a collaboration piece between myself and peppermintcrack(.tumblr.com), who came up with the idea for me to fill in!

Jack barely looks up when she hears footsteps.

They’ve become so familiar within the last few weeks that she could probably place them anywhere – heavy and entirely unhesitant, though that hasn’t always been the case. Jack had noticed the change in them too late, perhaps, around the same time that she realised she’d grown accustomed to Shepard’s visits. Almost began enjoying them, maybe, on the right night, with the right bottle of brandy in Shepard’s hands…

Looking up, now, she cranes her neck over one shoulder to catch Shepard’s lazy, one-handed wave, and then turns back to her terminal.

“I’m not interrupting, am I?” Shepard asks, though she does not stop where she is. She paces around to a set of crates that she’s taken as her own, and sits with a short sigh for her effort. Jack does not spare her a glance. “You always seem so busy down here.”

“And yet you always come back…”

“Ouch,” Shepard snorts, and places both hands back behind her hips. She leans her weight into them and lets her legs swing until the heel of each boot bangs against the face of the crate. In front of her, Jack’s head gives an involuntary twitch to the left. “So what _are_ you doing that’s got you so busy? Something that you maybe,” and she cranes her neck to see over Jack’s shoulder, “shouldn’t be doing?”

“Ha, you’d like to know.”

“Yeah, well, I hate to bring it up like this, but someone’s been writing erotic fiction about the crew. Namely, Miranda and Chiktikka. You wouldn’t have heard anything about that all the way down here, huh?” When Jack turns around again, her terminal screen is blank and her lips are pulled back in a too-large grin. Shepard does not restrain her sigh. “Right…”

“You down here for a reason?” Jack asks, and Shepard taps an exasperated hand against the bottle tucked into her hoodie’s left pocket. Jack eyes the obstructed label with interest. “That better not be Serrice Ice…”

“Just find some clean glasses, alright?”

When Jack sets two glasses down beside her, Shepard ignores the visible fingerprints and leaves the glass with the burgundy lipstick stain for Jack. It’s lifted with little qualm into the palm of Jack’s hand, and Shepard clinks their glasses together before Jack can take a sip.

“To saving the galaxy, or some shit like that,” Jack deadpans, and Shepard laughs into her glass.

“Exactly.”

Shepard tips her head back when she takes her first sip – closes her eyes and lets the wine slide down her throat. She drains half the glass without wincing, but it’s the way her elongated neck looks in the dim light (pale and smooth, like it would be soft to the touch) that has Jack staring. Her mouth is dry before she takes her first sip, and the wine does not help. She draws her glass back with a slight grimace, and when she looks up again, Shepard is grinning.

“Do you actually believe that, though?” Jack asks, scrutinizing her nails. “That if these Reapers exist and they’re coming for us, you’ll be able to stop them?”

She holds her breath for a moment, and when Shepard does not answer, she lifts her gaze to her face. What she finds there is strangely chilling; the grin is gone, and replaced by a look of certainty that makes Jack’s stomach coil – makes her want to inherently argue against it.

“They’re coming,” she’s told, and Jack might just believe her – might just be more of a sucker than she’d thought. “And alone, me? No. I don’t know what we’ll do.” Shepard lets that hang a moment, and then frowns at the direction that their conversation has turned in. It’s not why she came down here. Just the opposite, if she’s being honest with herself. “We’ll deal with that when it happens, I guess. First step’s first.”

“The Collectors.”

“Right.” Shepard takes another too-big sip of her wine, and Jack has a feeling that, at this rate, she’ll finish half the bottle before Jack has made her way through her first glass. “Enough about that, though. I didn’t come down here to talk shop.”

Jack grunts in agreement, and asks, “you actually had a reason, then?”

“Well,” Shepard huffs, refilling her glass, “you’re often better at holding a conversation than my fish, so…” Jack scoffs at that, and Shepard catches her gaze with a grin, sharp and quick. “Although _they_ ask me how my day is going, if I slept well.”

“I don’t need to speak to your fucking fish to know the answer to that.”

“Yeah, this entire ship’s worse than a knitting circle, sometimes.”

“What?” Jack asks, and then shakes her head – dismisses it. Doesn’t want to know or else does not care to (maybe even both, Shepard muses). “Look, if you’re wanting a shoulder to cry on, go to someone who gives a shit. The galaxy’s big and scary, blah, blah, and if you didn’t already know that… Well, you’ve been doing your job wrong, huh.”

Shepard stops the glass before it can reach her lips on her next sip, holds it just beneath her chin and breathes the red wine in while she watches Jack take an unapologetic gulp. “I’m not looking for that,” she says, eventually, and her eyes slip from Jack’s face, to the harness straps against her collar. “And your shoulders look bony as fuck, there’s no way I’d want to rest my head there.”

Jack gives an offended little start. “Fuck you,” but she’s grinning, toothy and too big, and Shepard is, too.

This is the main reason she’s down here, she’d tell Jack, did she want to get a dead-arm. Because Jack will tell her to _fuck off and grow up_ when she feels like hiding in bed every morning – because Jack won’t look at her with unrestrained pity every time she’s reminded of just what’s resting on Shepard’s shoulders. (Because, and more importantly now, Jack will watch her get shit faced on three glasses of wine and not think any less of her when she’s green the next morning.)

Following that thought, Shepard takes a too-large sip of her drink and almost chokes while trying to swallow it. Jack offers little help, but watches bemusedly, as though to see whether something as benign as a mouthful of wine could end the _Great Commander Shepard_ where merc groups and thresher maws alike have failed. She looks almost disappointed that the answer, ultimately, is _no_.

Shepard tries not to take offence at that. Her coughing, frowning, red face might just undermine that effort.

“Okay,” Jack says once she’s recovered, “so say we make it up to that big bug’s nest in the sky and squash the lot of them.” Shepard’s expression turns wary, though she nods her head for Jack to continue. “What then?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, our contracts last until we either explode at the relay, or make it back alive. At which point, the rest of us fuck off back to whatever we were doing before, and you…?” _Ah_. Shepard takes another mouthful of wine to stall from answering, and Jack’s smile turns downright predatory. “The Alliance would kiss your ass to get you back. And that Illusive Fuck would bend over on all—”

“ _Alright_ ,” Shepard chokes, wiping the spittle from her chin. “Can we maybe not— _ever_ put that image in my head again?”

“You know it’s true.”

“I don’t know what happens at the end of all this,” Shepard says, purposefully moving the conversation along. She finishes her second glass of the night and does not choke this time as the wine slides down her gullet, pooling like warm silk at the bottom of her stomach. She does not hesitate to refill. “I’m trying not to think of it.”

Jack’s head falls to an angle, the move disbelieving despite her curious expression. Her gaze holds Shepard’s for a moment too long, brown against green, until her eyes narrow and a wide, satisfied smile tugs at her lips.

“I know what I’d do.”

“I don’t think I even want to ask.”

“He wouldn’t see this ship again,” Jack says, regardless. “And neither would the fucking Alliance. You ever been to Tortuga?” Shepard’s brow furrows, but Jack’s face is beginning to glow with real excitement, now. She sits up straight and then leans forward, setting an elbow to one knee to keep her balanced. “Drugs, hookers,” she lists, and runs the edge of her tongue along her upper teeth. Shepard tries not to shiver when she notices. “You could sell half your crew for another decent ship.”

That snaps Shepard’s attention back up to narrowed, brown eyes. She hopes the grin on Jack’s lips means she’s joking.

“That’s your big plan? Get hammered until the galaxy falls apart?”

Jack’s grin folds into a downward tilt. “At least I have a plan.”

“A shitty one,” Shepard huffs, and takes another drink.

The wine is beginning to make the room, with all of its metallic greys and hard edges, look champagne-pink soft. The lighting from Engineering gives Jack’s tattooed skin a permanent blush. Shepard wonders if the same can be said for her own face – wonders if the red lighting is making all that much of a difference. Too warm, suddenly, she wrestles out of her N7 hoodie, draping it over the crate to her left.

Opposite her, Jack is on her feet, her wine glass discarded and still half-full on the floor. Shepard pushes her fingers through her hair while she watches Jack climb over her make-shift cot. With only Jack’s back in sight, Shepard has to rely on the sound of metal scraping metal, and the following clink of a tin being returned to a plastic crate.

When Jack turns around, there’s a hand-rolled cigarette between her lips and a novelty bare-chested batarian lighter in her hand. Shepard narrows her eyes when she sees it, and Jack make a deliberate show of sitting down on the floor beside her wine, her movements slow and precise. She stretches both legs out in front of her, meets Shepard’s gaze, and sparks a flame just beneath the end of her cigarette.

She inhales slowly, teasing the smoke through the filter and into her lungs, and holds it for a moment too-long before releasing it again in a visible breath. A swirl of if shivers towards Shepard, and she blows it out of sight before it can reach her face. When she next meets Jack’s gaze, her expression is undoubtedly disapproving.

Without a shred of shame, Jack takes another draw from the cigarette, and then pinches it from her lips with two fingers and a thumb. She holds it out towards Shepard, arm extended while she exhales another cloud of smoke, and Shepard hesitates only when she realises just how close to being drunk she already is before standing from her perch.

She moves towards Jack’s left side, and sits with more care than she’d have liked to have needed, one hand on the floor for balance. This close, she has Jack’s bare arm warm against her own. When she tilts her head towards her, she’s almost surprised by how close they suddenly are, and parts her lips when Jack brings the lipstick marked cigarette end towards her mouth.

She keeps her hold on it, too, as Shepard takes a drag and tries not to cough it back out again. It’s been a while since she’s done this. Beside her, Jack scoffs like she’d been expecting it, and takes the cigarette back again. Shepard wets her lips.

“This is why EDI doesn’t like you,” she says, turning to watch Jack as she exhales and shrugs, the cigarette pinched between two fingers and her thumb as though she’s expecting somebody to fight her for it. Shepard doesn’t ask for another drag, and Jack does not offer again. “If Miranda could see us down here… you think there are cameras?”

Jack casts the ceiling a disinterested look, and then smirks. “I hope there are.”

“She’s not a threat to you, you know?” Shepard asks her after a moment of quiet. “You don’t need to be so… antagonistic towards her. And, really,” wincing, now, “the weird fiction has gotta stop.”

Jack makes a noise that Shepard can’t decipher, and then turns to her, her eyes dark and sharp. “Did you read it?”

“Uh, what?” She looks like she’s going to deny it for .2 seconds, and then grimaces. “Yeah.”

“What did you think?”

“That it was… disturbingly detailed.”

Jack nods her head slowly, her smile pulled back to reveal her teeth, sharp and white. The noise she makes this time is undoubtedly pleased. Shepard tries to shake several unwanted images out of her mind, but the alcohol is making her thoughts foggy, sluggish, and so she turns to Jack instead. She doesn’t realise she’s staring until Jack does the same, her expression steadily becoming uneasy. She lowers her cigarette down from her lips and does not seem to notice when ash drips into her lap.

The corner of her lips is drawn in between her teeth, burgundy red, like a day-old blood stain, trapped between white. There’s something like uncertainty in Jack’s brown eyes, and how awful, Shepard thinks, that she looks so fucking pretty when she’s frowning.

“You’re getting too close,” Jack says after a moment, and Shepard takes a full two seconds to complete a blink.

“I know.”

She almost doesn’t mean to move in. She realises what she’s doing just as Jack does, and both of them freeze, a breath apart and equally horrified at what almost just—

“Shit,” Shepard tries to laugh, though it comes out a self-deprecating sigh. She closes her eyes and looks away – she misses the way Jack’s frown deepens and then relaxes, unnaturally quickly. “Shit, sorry. Here, you better take this from me, I think I’ve drank too much already. Uh…”

She’s up on her feet, staggering against a stack of crates, before Jack can even set the wine glass down. She does not turn around until she reaches the stairs, a hand to the wall to steady herself, and finds Jack unmoved on the floor. Shepard nods when Jack meets her gaze; her eyes are strangely piercing in the red glow of the bunker, and she finds that she can’t hold them for longer than a few seconds before her gaze darts away again.

“See you in the morning,” eventually, no goodbye, and she takes the stairs two unsteady steps at a time.

 

It almost is morning, too, when Jack pulls herself out of her bunker and into the elevator outside engineering. She has no reason to pass anyone on the way, and stews with one hand against the wall until she’s stopped on the appropriate floor.

Outside of Shepard’s cabin doors, she stops and waits, breathes, brings one hand to the holographic interface and then lets it drop again. Finally, with a self-deprecating _tsk_ of annoyance, she pushes the pad too hard and does not let herself hesitate again until she’s inside Shepard’s cabin, standing over the bed.

It’s dark until Shepard sits up, one hand lazily waving out to knock a button by her bedside. The cabin illuminates with a glow that just about illuminates Jack from the shadows. Still, Shepard sees her, and sits up in bed, sleep forgotten. The room tilts briefly when she swings both legs over the edge of the bed, but the alcohol in her system is nothing more than a buzz – a warning that she’ll want to skip breakfast, but nothing more serious.

“Jack?”

“You forgot your hoodie,” Jack says, and almost surprises herself with how quickly she thinks of it.

Shepard nods her head in realisation, but Jack's hands are empty, and the look on her face soon draws Shepard up out of bed. “You didn’t bring it?” she asks unnecessarily, and Jack seems to check her own hands, as though they might have thought ahead for her. She frowns at what she finds there, and closes them into fists.

“No.”

“Right.”

“You forgot your wine, too.”

There’s almost a bite in her words, but not quite, and Shepard narrows her eyes as she winces. “Yeah,” she sighs, and then takes a deeper breath. “Look, I’m sorry if I… I’m your superior and it was _incredibly_ inappropriate that I— Jack?”

She stops at the look on Jack’s face, the frown that grows until she’s almost _pouting_ , almost _furious_.

“Don’t be such a fucking pussy.”

Shepard blinks, but before she can ask for clarification, Jack steps forward into her space. Her hands are small and tight in Shepard’s tank top, and she almost isn’t expecting the sheer force that Jack utilizes to pull her in. She lands against her, chest-to-chest, with the breath stuttering halfway to her lungs. (She smells like nicotine and every other bad habit that Shepard's struggled to give up.) Jack’s almost exactly her height with her boots on, and this close to her, Shepard can’t get away from her eyes.

Isn’t sure she wants to, either, even if she knows she should.

But Jack’s lips are so soft against her own – they’re warm and full and so _unlike_ what Shepard has imagined (and she has imagined, too frequently) – that Shepard can’t do much but accept the kiss, her open eyes staring into Jack’s. There’s a look of vulnerability so out of place there that Shepard’s rooted to the spot with surprise that Jack would even let her see it.

It does not last.

Shepard’s inactivity is not appreciated nor does it appease, and it shows in Jack’s eyes with a twist of anger – with a sharp bite to Shepard’s bottom lip that has her own mouth parting in a gasp. It’s the jolt she needs towards a reaction other than surprise.

(Jack almost _sighs_ the held breath out of her nose when Shepard finally reciprocates, two strong hands on either side of her face, a tongue warm and soft and gently pressing past her lips, teasing at her own until she’s shaking with the effort to hold back a moan.)

Even after parting, Jack’s eyes remain closed for a second too long. When they open again, Shepard is smiling; it’s enough to make her blush, and she drops Shepard’s tank top with a playful, embarrassed shove.

“A pussy, am I?”

“Shut up, Shepard,” Jack scoffs. “Go back to sleep.”

Shepard doesn’t stop her from leaving, and Jack is relieved. She isn’t sure she’d be able to force the grin off her face, and does not bother to try, even once she’s reached the red-tinted bunker that usually works so well at easing the tension out of her body. It offers no such reprieve now, though Jack can’t find it in herself to care.

Discarded over a set of crates, Jack finds Shepard’s rumpled hoodie and the grin aches in her cheeks.

She hesitates only a second before pulling it on and slipping into bed.


End file.
